Culture Clash

December 27, 1999|By BOB STRAUSS Los Angeles Daily News

You just wanted to make a nice, slightly epic family entertainment. You wanted to adjust a proven, beloved story's somewhat retrograde racial and sexual politics to more enlightened attitudes, sincere in your conviction not to offend. You got America's most respected actress and Asia's hottest leading man in the main roles.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, lots in the case of Anna and the King, the fourth movie version of a popular cross-cultural romantic adventure. It was first filmed in 1946 as Anna and the King of Siam with Irene Dunne and Rex Harrison, then in the 1956 adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical The King and I with Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner, most recently as a kiddie cartoon King and I released earlier this year. The latest incarnation, which opened Dec. 17, stars Jodie Foster as plucky English widow Anna Leonowens and Hong Kong action icon Chow Yun-Fat as the visionary 19th century Siamese ruler King Mongkut.

To begin with, it's not the most flattering portrait of the controversial Leonowens, a woman whose own accounts of her sojourn in the court of Siam are considered highly suspect. But the chance to reveal her personality warts was precisely what drew Foster to the demanding part.

"Anna did a lot of exaggerating about her background -- that we all know," Foster acknowledges, "which was understandable since, like everybody else in Victorian times, she wanted to appear to be of better standing than she was. In terms of what she did, though, I think she was pretty true in everything that she said. It's just that her interpretation of things was quite exaggerated.

"She was a little self-important -- and quite hyperbolic in her descriptions of things. I think that made her more complicated and interesting; she was just trying to figure out how to survive with a little kid and no money at a time when women barely went outside the house, let alone traveled 6,000 miles to a country where she didn't even speak the language.

"She was by no means perfect and by no means nice nor without bitterness. And she was very judgmental, very opinionated; and even she herself admitted that she was way too pushy. So, maybe the difference between my version and the Deborah Kerr-Irene Dunne versions is, in this era, we can actually create female characters that change, that start off having a lot to learn and, by the end of the movie, find their softness."

Like previous dramatic glosses on the story, the new Anna is founded on Leonowens' memoirs of her stint teaching Western knowledge to Mongkut's 58 children. But while the Harrison-Dunne version drew heavily from Margaret Landon's highly romanticized book on the subject, the new film's screenplay, credited to Steve Meerson and Peter Krikes and rewritten by director Andy Tennant (Ever After), was more informed by independent research.

But even though Tennant and company tried mightily to present Mongkut and Victorian-era Siam in an accurate and respectful manner, they couldn't overcome the Thai government's long-standing resentment of Hollywood's previous attempts to tell the story. Many Thais have disliked the idea of Caucasian Harrison impersonating one of their most venerated monarchs. And even though Brynner's mysterious lineage likely included Asian ancestors, Thais considered his performance as Mongkut insultingly clownish.

Despite extensive negotiations with Bangkok officials for permission to film on authentic locations, Tennant and company ultimately had to move the production to neighboring Malaysia -- where the Siamese royal palace and other important sets had to be built from scratch.

"I think Thailand's biggest objection to the project was that we were making it," Tennant jokes, not playfully. "They still haven't recovered from The King and I, they are so offended by it. As we went in and began talking to officials, I was incredibly sympathetic to their objections. Once you learn the true story of King Mongkut, you realize that he wasn't the barbaric buffoon that he'd been painted as in that movie, who had to be rescued and tamed by a white woman.

"I mean, he was a monk for 30 years, and he handled tremendous problems during his reign. Yet, he was the only ruler to maintain his country's independence during all the partitioning of Southeast Asia during the European colonizing period. So he was a really remarkable man, and we kept saying that that's the story we wanted to tell.

"But they also believe that their king is a god, so anything in our script that made the king human was objectionable. We finally ran out of time and patience and moved to Malaysia, which made the movie more expensive. But we were going to make it anyway, so in the end, I think, it was Thailand's loss."